The Historians' History of the World 03

To many of his hearers that which he required was a very painful sacrifice. Many had been born, and had passed all their lives, in the country. They were attached to it, not merely by the profit or the pleasure of rural pursuits, but by domestic and religious associations. For though the incorporation of the Attic townships had for ages extinguished their political independence, it had not interrupted their religious traditions, or effaced the peculiar features of their local worship; and hence the Attic countryman clung to his deme with a fondness which he could not feel for the great city. In the period of increasing prosperity which had followed the Persian invasion, the country had been cultivated and adorned more assiduously than ever. All was now to be left or carried away. Reluctantly they adopted the decree which Pericles proposed; and, with heavy hearts, as if going into exile, they quitted their native and hereditary seats. If the rich man sighed to part from his elegant villa, the husbandman still more deeply felt the pang of being torn from his home, and of abandoning his beloved fields, the scenes of his infancy, the holy places where his forefathers had worshipped, to the ravages of a merciless invader. All however was removed: the flocks and cattle to Eubœa and other adjacent islands; all beside that was portable, and even the timber of the houses, into Athens, to which they themselves migrated with their families.

The city itself was not prepared for the sudden influx of so many new inhabitants. A few found shelter under the roofs of relatives or friends; but the greater part, on their arrival, found themselves houseless as well as homeless. Some took refuge in such temples as were usually open; others occupied the towers of the walls; others raised temporary hovels on any vacant ground which they could find in the city, and even resorted for this purpose to a site which had hitherto been guarded from all such uses by policy, aided by a religious sanction. It was the place under the western wall of the citadel, called, from the ancient builders of the wall, the Pelasgicum: a curse had been pronounced on any one who should tenant it; and men remembered some words of an oracle, which declared it better untrodden. The real motive for the prohibition was probably the security of the citadel; but all police seems to have been suspended by the urgency of the occasion. It was some time before the newcomers bethought themselves of spreading over the vacant space between the long walls, or of descending to Piræus. But this foretaste of the evils of war did not damp the general ardour, especially that of the youthful spirits, which began at Athens, as elsewhere, to be impatient of repose. Numberless oracles and predictions were circulated, in which every one found something that accorded with the tone of his feelings. Even those who had no definite hopes, fears, or wishes shared the excitement of men on the eve of a great crisis. The holy island of Delos had been recently shaken by an earthquake. It was forgotten, or was never known out of Delos itself, that this had happened already, just before the first Persian invasion. It was deemed a portent, which signified new and extraordinary events, and it was soon combined with other prodigies, which tended to encourage similar forebodings. Such was the state in which the Athenians awaited the advance of the Peloponnesian army.c

Adolf Holme compares the Periclean policy of voluntary reconcentration with the acts of the Dutch, when in the sixteenth century they let the Spanish destroy their crops, and then opened the dikes and flooded their own country. We may compare also the compulsory reconcentration of the country people in the cities as carried out by General Weyler in Cuba, in 1897, and by Lord Kitchener in South Africa, in 1901.

a

THE FIRST YEAR’S RAVAGE

Archidamus, as soon as the reception of his last envoy was made known to him, continued his march from the isthmus into Attica—which territory he entered by the road of Œnoe, the frontier Athenian fortress of Attica towards Bœotia. His march, was slow, and he thought it necessary to make a regular attack on the fort of Œnoe, which had been put in so good a state of defence that, after all the various modes of assault—in which the Lacedæmonians were not skilful—had been tried in vain, and after a delay of several days before the place, he was compelled to renounce the attempt.